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The Numinous, the Ethical, and the Body. Rudolf Otto's

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The Numinous, the Ethical, and the Body. Rudolf Otto's Open Theology 2017; 3: 546–564 Phenomenology of Religious Experience Henning Nörenberg* The Numinous, the Ethical, and the Body. Rudolf Otto’s “The Idea of the Holy” Revisited https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2017-0042 Received June 1, 2017; accepted August 31, 2017 Abstract: In this paper, I investigate the non-rational, affective dimension of religious experience that Rudolf Otto attempted to address with his notion of the numinous. I argue that this notion is best understood in terms of an atmospheric quality impacting on the subject’s feeling body. Therefore, I draw on discussions in phenomenology and pragmatism, despite the fact that Otto’s own epistemological framework is rooted in a different tradition. Drawing on those discussions helps defend some of Otto’s claims about the relation between the non-rational, affective dimension and reason against the prevalent accusation of unscientific mysticism. I then illustrate the yet unexhausted potential of these very claims by arguing that the numinous in Otto’s sense plays an irreducible role in the ethical reflections of such distinct authors as Kant and Levinas. Keywords: Rudolf Otto; atmosphere; Dewey; Kant; Levinas; phenomenology Introduction Among the classics in philosophy of religion is Rudolf Otto’s 1917 book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy). It has influenced the work of Mircea Eliade, Max Scheler, Gerardus van der Leeuw, C.S. Lewis and many others. In his study, Otto gives detailed descriptions of a peculiar affective dimension of religious life. As the subtitle of his book, An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, already suggests, Otto is interested in analyzing a particular affective dimension of religious experience that is at the same time supposed to be non-rational, non-conceptual or non-discursive. The affective dimension in question is called “creature-feeling” or, more precisely, “numinous” feeling, and can be preliminarily characterized as “the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”1 In this paper I will introduce some of the central ideas in Otto’s book, develop them further in light of later especially phenomenological and pragmatist research on bodily feeling, and consider their potential significance for moral theory. In section 1, I will set out Otto’s claims concerning the object-relatedness of that feeling as well as its relation to the conceptual—or “rational”—dimension of human experience. First, I will present his claim that the various “rational” meanings in religious life and the specific doctrines related to it could not be properly understood without taking the non-rational element of “creature-feeling” into account. Then I will turn to Otto’s view on what one could approximately label the intentionality of the relevant feeling: The “creature-feeling” would be misunderstood if it was construed as a mere state of mind without taking into account that it is “about” something other than the subject. This something is called the “numinous”, and I will suggest that it is preliminarily conceived of as the specific “formal object” of the feeling in question. 1 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 10. *Corresponding author: Henning Nörenberg, University of Rostock, Germany; E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2017 Henning Nörenberg, published by De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. The Numinous, the Ethical, and the Body. Rudolf Otto’s “The Idea of the Holy” Revisited 547 Conceiving of the numinous as the formal object is, I think, appropriate and can also help dispel a plethora of criticism that accuses Otto of unscientific mysticism. However, the notion of formal object is not as informative when it comes to making sense of the full phenomenological potential in his descriptions, especially with regard to the implications concerning the non-rational or non-conceptual dimension of experience. For this reason, I suggest in section 2 that the concept of the numinous can be further enriched in the light of Dewey’s notion of quality and the phenomenology of the bodily apprehension of atmospheres. As such, my focus will be more on the phenomenological and pragmatist aspects in Otto, rather than on the Kantian-Friesian perspective that is also at work in The Idea of the Holy.2 Against the backdrop of these specifications, I then set out the central traits of Otto’s descriptions of the numinous as a felt quality in section 3. Finally, in section 4, I attempt to locate these exact traits in two influential accounts of moral obligation, namely Kant’s answer to the question of how the subject can be motivated to act for the sake of the moral law itself and Levinas’ theory of the subject’s responsibility to the absolute Other. The upshot is that at the very least these accounts need—unwittingly or not—to refer to the numinous as a felt quality and thus to a non-rational or non-conceptual, affective dimension of experience. 1 Central claims in The Idea of the Holy 1.1 The non-rational dimension In this section I wish to introduce two of the central claims in The Idea of the Holy. Otto’s first claim concerns the relation between the affective dimension of religious experience and reason. It is related to his suggestion to conceive of the numinous as “‘the holy’ minus its moral factor or ‘moment’, and […] minus its ‘rational’ aspect altogether.”3 Otto argues that religious experience involves a “creature feeling”. This “creature- feeling” is conceived as a “non-rational” dimension of life.4 This talk of a “non-rational element in the idea of the divine” is supposed to capture that the “creature-feeling” cannot be exhaustively explicated in terms of concepts and their logical association.5 Rather, it is the other way around: Taken by themselves, “rational” or conceptual contents, such as the idea of a transcendent reality or the doctrine of original sin, are mere possibilities of thought, and the subject could consider them while remaining completely indifferent as to whether they apply in actuality. What is lacking in this case is the subject’s intuition that something real is intended by those contents, and according to Otto, this intuition is achieved by the very “creature-feeling” that involves specific “feelings of abasement and prostration and of the diminution of the self into nothingness.”6 Many will find this claim strange, and indeed, Otto has been much criticized for his discussion of the non-rational dimension. Feigel, one of Otto’s earliest critics, regarded The Idea of the Holy as a “manifestation of a more general trend toward irrationalism.”7 Heidegger criticized that the “concept of the irrational, after all, is supposed to be determined from out of the opposition to the concept of the rational, which, however, finds itself in notorious indetermination.”8 More recently, Agamben has given the following withering assessment of Otto’s approach: “Here, in a concept of the sacred that completely coincides with the concept of the obscure and the impenetrable, a theology that had lost all experience of the revealed word, celebrated 2 Phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler or Hermann Schmitz have perceived a tension between a more phenomenological and a more Kantian tendency in Otto’s work. See Almond, “Rudolf Otto and the Kantian Tradition”, 52 f.; Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity, 161 f.; Schmitz, Das Reich der Normen, 155. 3 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 6. 4 This is, at least as far as I can see, a more appropriate way of putting it than the “irrational” in the German original text. 5 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 61. 6 Ibid., 53. 7 Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity, 133 f. See Feigel, Das Heilige. 8 Heidgger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 54. 548 H. Nörenberg its union with a philosophy that had abandoned all sobriety in the face of feeling.”9 These and many more critics take issue with Otto’s attempt to investigate the non-rational dimension of religious life. A closer examination of Otto’s account, however, reveals that the substance of his position is more closely related to less disputed accounts than it might seem at the outset. Otto’s claim about the non- rational dimension is, for instance, similar to William James’ argument about temper and its influence on philosophical thought: Given a rather “tender-minded” background orientation towards the world, you will more likely be attracted to idealistic and optimistic theories, whereas the “hard-minded” may find a materialistic and pessimistic view more persuasive.10 A similar correlation is acknowledged by Heidegger himself in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Heidegger presents a peculiar “homesickness” as the fundamental attunement of philosophizing in which we who philosophize are “driven” to “being as a whole”.11 According to Heidegger, the proper meaning of metaphysical concepts such as “world”, “finitude” and “individuation” can only be grasped by those who philosophize in and out of that peculiar attunement. Another, more recent framework to which Otto’s talk of the non-rational dimension can be related is Ratcliffe’s notion of existential feelings as specific ways of finding oneself in the world.12 On the basis of phenomenological as well as pragmatist insights, Ratcliffe argues that an existential feeling provides the subject with what he calls a pre-intentional background orientation toward the world (or a specific situation).13 Against the backdrop of specific existential feelings, particular intentional acts are supposed to receive—or lose—their intelligibility. Besides many other examples, Ratcliffe describes a radical form of hope that, unlike less radical instances of hope, cannot be interpreted as an intentional state of the form “I/we hope that p”, even if one assumes a very general propositional content, such as “good will ultimately come of this”.14 Ratcliffe argues that the same feeling of radical hope can be explicated in terms of various propositions (“life will go on”, “the world is ultimately good”, etc.) whose contents cannot simply be reduced to one another.
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